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demmiblue's JournalBorder Officials Weighed Deploying Migrant 'Heat Ray' Ahead of Midterms
Source: NYT
WASHINGTON — Fifteen days before the 2018 midterm elections, as President Trump sought to motivate Republicans with dark warnings about caravans heading to the U.S. border, he gathered his Homeland Security secretary and White House staff to deliver a message: “extreme action” was needed to stop the migrants.
That afternoon, at a meeting with top leaders of the Department of Homeland Security, Customs and Border Protection officials suggested deploying a microwave weapon — a “heat-ray” designed by the military to make people’s skin feel like it is burning when they get within range of its invisible beams.
Developed by the military as a crowd dispersal tool two decades ago, the Active Denial System had been largely abandoned amid doubts over its effectiveness and morality. Two former officials who attended the afternoon meeting at the Homeland Security Department on Oct. 22, 2018, said the suggestion that the device be installed at the border shocked attendees, even if it would have satisfied the president. Kirstjen Nielsen, then the secretary of Homeland Security told an aide after the meeting that she would not authorize the use of such a device, and it should never be brought up again in her presence, the officials said.
Alexei Woltornist, a spokesman for the Homeland Security Department, said Wednesday that “it was never considered.”
But the discussion in the fall of 2018 underscored how Mr. Trump’s obsession with shutting down immigration has driven policy considerations, including his suggestions of installing flesh-piercing spikes on the border wall, building a moat filled with snakes and alligators and shooting migrants in the legs.
Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/26/us/politics/trump-campaign-immigration.html
The Biden team has added hand sanitizer -- complete with his Covid-19 plan printed on it...
The Tigers got a surprise during batting practice.
https://twitter.com/BradGalli/status/1298595088499703808
Did...did Kole Calhoun just intentionally use his head to block a throw???
https://twitter.com/DannyVietti/status/1298131343709097984Damn!
This is not how to do it: a BLM protest (with no black people visible)... demanding White diners
https://twitter.com/KunkleFredrick/status/12983442850798387202) In Adams Morgan, protesters screamed at Lauren B. Victor for several minutes for refusing to raise her fist with them.
“Are you a Christian?” a female protester demanded.
“Good for you — you stood your ground," Chuck Modiano said sarcastically as the crowd moved on.
3) Modiano, who had been yelling at Victor and moments later identified himself as a citizen journalist who writes for @Deadspin, told Victor he couldn’t understand why she was the only diner in the area who wouldn’t comply. “What was in you, you couldn’t do this?”
4) “I felt I was under attack,” Victor, an urban planner, said, adding that she felt there was something wrong about being coerced to show support.
5) “In the moment, it didn’t feel right,” Victor said, adding that she also could understand their anger. “I wasn’t actually frightened. I didn’t think they’d do anything to me,” she said. “I’m very much with them. I’ve been marching with them for weeks and weeks and weeks."
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1298344285079838720.html
https://twitter.com/TeachEsp/status/1298362781062889473
Michael Cohen: You asked for it and I am complying...just agreed to appear on @maddow
https://twitter.com/MichaelCohen212/status/1298334188979068930
An RNC Speaker Said Cops Would Be 'Smart' to Racially Profile Her Own Son
“I recognize that I’m gonna have to have a different conversation with Jude than I do with my brown-haired little Irish, very, very pale-skinned, white sons, as they grow up,” Abby Johnson, a prominent anti-abortion activist, said in a 15-plus-minutes video posted to YouTube in late June, after weeks of nationwide protests against the police killing of George Floyd.
“Right now, Jude is an adorable, perpetually tan-looking little brown boy,” said Johnson, whose husband blogged, in 2015, about adopting their biracial son at his birth. Johnson is white. “But one day, he’s going to grow up and he’s going to be a tall, probably sort of large, intimidating-looking-maybe brown man. And my other boys are probably gonna look like nerdy white guys.”
But the fact that the police could one day view her sons differently, simply due to the color of their skin, doesn’t make Johnson mad, she said. Instead, it makes sense to her.
“Statistically, I look at our prison population and see that there is a disproportionately high number of African-American males in our prison population for crimes, particularly for violent crimes. So statistically, when a police officer sees a brown man like my Jude walking down the road — as opposed to my white nerdy kids, my white nerdy men walking down the road — because of the statistics that he knows in his head, that these police officers know in their head, they’re going to know that statistically my brown son is more likely to commit a violent offense over my white sons.”
“So the fact that in his head, he would be more careful around my brown son than my white son, that doesn’t actually make me angry. That makes that police officer smart, because of statistics.”
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/935me3/an-rnc-speaker-said-cops-would-be-smart-to-racially-profile-her-own-son?utm_source=vicenewstwitter
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